Tag Archive: Michael Nyqvist

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, concluding the Swedish film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy novels, is a broad, pulpy thriller about how our heroes Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) and Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) unravel a vast conspiracy to cover up … um, something or other. In my review of the previous film, The Girl Who Played with Fire, I wrote that I wasn’t exactly clear on the plot, and I’m still not exactly clear on the plot of that film, which had to do with secrets from Lisbeth’s past coming back to haunt her. Hornets’ Nest picks up where Fire left off, but in its more straightforward, bad-guys-get-their-comeuppance way, I was surprised to find that I enjoyed it. It’s quite long at 147 minutes but moves briskly.

I streamed The Girl Who Played with Fire through Netflix, and as soon as the credits started rolling I opened a new tab in Google Chrome to research the film on Wikipedia. I needed a summary of the plot.

Perhaps because I know Sweden mostly as the home of Ingmar Bergman and Let the Right One In, I was expecting something different from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It shapes up as an old-fashioned Agatha Christie-style mystery about two dogged, mismatched detectives going through a cold case to uncover hidden family secrets and a killer still on the loose; but for the graphic sexuality and macabre violence it would be at home on Masterpiece Theater. At first I was disappointed at its conventional nature, but then I went with the flow. I like Masterpiece Theater … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org.